Harvard '99 percent' sure library book is covered in human skin

Tests on a 19th century book in a Harvard Library have revealed that the binding is made out of human skin.

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The Houghton Library contains a number of bibliographical curiosities, but the copy of Arsène Houssaye's Des destinées de l'ame is one of the strangest. The book is a meditation on life after death and was given by the author to his friend and medical doctor Dr Ludovic Bouland in the mid-1880s.

The story goes that Bouland bound the book with the skin from the unclaimed body of a female mental patient who had died from a stroke.

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An inscription by Bouland in the front of the book declared [in French] that it had been bound in "human skin parchment on which no ornament has been stamped to preserve its elegance". "By looking carefully you easily distinguish the pores of the skin. A book about the human soul deserved to have a human covering: I had kept this piece of human skin taken from the back of a woman. It is interesting to see the different aspects that change this skin according to the method of preparation to which it is subjected. Compare for example with the small volume I have in my library, Sever. Pinaeus de Virginitatis notis which is also bound in human skin but tanned with sumac." (The latter book actually resides in the Wellcome Collection).

Binding books in human skin is a practice called "anthropodermic bibliopegy" and it was carried out since the 17th century, often at the request of the skin's "owner". A famous example of this is James Allen's book The Highwayman: Narrative of the Life of James Allen alias George Walton -- Allen requested that the book be bound in his own skin. On other occasions, copies of judicial proceedings were bound in the skin of the convicted murderers detailed within them.

Despite the inscription claiming that Houssaye's book was bound in this way, Harvard librarians haven't conducted thorough tests on the skin until now. In order to verify whether or not it was indeed human skin, tiny samples were taken from the binding and these were analysed using a technique called peptide mass fingerprinting, an analytical approach that identifies the provenance of proteins.

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This process made it clear that the parchment did not come from other common sources such as cows, sheep or goats and showed that it was consistent with human skin, but could also belong to other primates such as gibbons or gorillas.

The skin was further analysed using a technique called liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry, which determines the order of amino acids and reveals differences between species. The data revealed -- with 99 percent certainty -- that the binding was made out of human skin, according to Senior Rare Book Conservator Alan Puglia.